Shalimar the Clown (53 page)

It’s dog eat dog up there in the Himalayas, ladies and gentlemen, the Indian army against the Pakistan-sponsored fanatics, we sent men out to discover the truth and the truth is what they brought home. You want to know this man, my client? The defense will show that his village was destroyed by the Indian army. Razed to the ground, every structure destroyed. The dead body of his brother was thrown at his mother’s feet with the hands severed. Then his mother was raped and killed and his father was also slain. And then they killed his wife, his beloved wife, the greatest dancer in the village, the greatest beauty in all Kashmir. You don’t need psych profiling to get the point of this, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, this kind of thing would derange the best of us, and the best of them is what he was, a star performer in a troupe of traveling players, a comedian of the high wire, an artist, famous in his way, Shalimar the clown. Then one day his whole world was shattered and his mind with it. This is exactly the kind of person the terrorist puppet masters seek out, this is the kind of mind that responds to their sorcery. The subject’s picture of the world has been broken and a new one is painted for him, brushstroke by brushstroke. Like the man says in the movie you aren’t going to see in Judge Weissberg’s courtroom, they don’t just get brainwashed, they get
dry-cleaned.
This is a man against whose whole community a blood crime was committed that he could not avenge, a blood crime that drove him out of his mind. When a man is out of his mind other forces can enter that mind and shape it. They took that avenging spirit and pointed it in the direction they required, not at India, but here. At America. At their real enemy. At us.

The Manchurian bubble burst, as Larry Tanizaki had promised Janet Mientkiewicz it would, the day Kashmira Ophuls took the stand for the defense. A hostile witness was always a gamble, and Tillerman’s decision to field the Ophuls girl was, in Tanizaki’s opinion, a weak choice, a choice that showed what a house of cards his case was. Under cross-examination by Janet Mientkiewicz, Kashmira revealed what Shalimar the clown had not told his attorney, what Tillerman’s researchers had been unable to discover, what the usurpers of Pachigam did not know and the Yambarzals in Shirmal would not tell. In a single, brief statement, made with an executioner’s calm, she unmade the defense’s case. “That wasn’t how my mother died,” she said. “My mother died because that man, who also killed my father, cut off her beautiful head.”

She turned to face Shalimar the clown and he understood perfectly what she did not need words to say.
Now I have killed you,
she told him.
Now my arrow is in your heart and I am satisfied. When the time comes to execute you I will come and watch you die.

On the day after sentence was passed on him Shalimar the clown was moved by road to the California state prison at San Quentin where the men’s death-row facility was located. Once again extreme security precautions were taken; he did not travel in the regular jail bus, and the eleven-vehicle motorcade with motorbikes buzzing beside it and helicopters tracking it from the sky looked, as it moved north past the silent concrete bells of the Camino Real, like a monarch’s journey into exile, like Napoleon in rags on his way to St. Helena. He remained impassive throughout the twelve-hour journey. His features had acquired something of the grey, pasty color and texture of prison life and his hair was whiter and had thinned a little. He did not speak to the guards sitting beside and across from him in the white armored van except once, to ask for a drink of water. He had the air of a man who had accepted his fate, and retained his calm demeanor while he was processed through the death-row reception center, photographed, fingerprinted, given blankets and prison blues, and then led wearing waist chains to the adjustment center or A/C to await classification. Here his possessions were taken from him except for a pencil and a sheet of writing paper and a comb and a bar of soap. He was handed a toothbrush with all but an inch of the handle cut off and some tooth powder. Then he was locked in a cage and stripped naked and the guards looked, as it was their habit to look, under his testicles and inside his bodily orifices, crack a smile, one of them told him, and he didn’t understand until the guard grabbed him by the back of the neck and bent him over so they could inspect his rear. He was handcuffed and checked with a metal detector and taken to his cell. The guard yelled the cell number and the door opened with a great hiss because compressed air was used to open and close it. Then a tray slot was opened and he put his hands through it and his handcuffs were removed. All this he suffered without protest. From the beginning the guards were struck by his quality of stillness,
He was on some kind of meditation trip,
they said, and later, after he made his impossible escape, his captors were almost respectful,
It’s like spaceships,
one of them argued,
if you don’t see them you don’t believe in them, but me and my colleagues here, we saw what we saw.

Most of the men under sentence of death were sent to the East Block or the “North Seg”—the original death row, where the gas chamber was located—but those who were classified Grade B Condemned—the gang members, the men who had been involved in stabbings while in prison, the ones other inmates wanted to see dead in a hurry—had to stay in the A/C, where there were almost a hundred solitary confinement cells, on three floors. The classification committee decided that Shalimar the clown was a Grade-B prisoner because of the potentially large numbers of enemies he might find in the prison population. There were about thirty-five men in the North Seg and over three hundred in the East Block and violence and rape were commonplace and anything could be a weapon, a pencil stub could put out a man’s eye. The men were let out for yard in groups of sixty or seventy and this was a dangerous time. If a fight broke out a guard might start shooting down into the yard and the risk of being hit by a bullet bouncing off the concrete walls was not small. The accommodation in the A/C was unpleasant even by the standards of death row but for a long time Shalimar the clown opted not to participate in yard. He remained in his cell, doing push-ups or strange, slow-motion, dancelike exercises for hour after hour or, for further hours at a time, simply sitting cross-legged on the floor with his eyes closed and his hands lying open on his knees, with the palms upturned.

His room was ten feet long and four feet wide and contained a bed made of a plate of steel and a stainless-steel sink and toilet. Twice a month the prison issued him writing paper, toilet paper, a pencil and some soap. He was not allowed to have a cup. He was given a container of milk for breakfast each day and if he wanted coffee he had to hold this container out through the tray slot and the guard would pour hot coffee into it. When the guard’s aim was poor Shalimar the clown’s hands were scalded, but he never cried out. The A/C was filled with the noises of a hundred condemned human beings and their smells as well. The men shouted and raged and made obscene remarks but they were also full of philosophy and religion and there were some who sang,
The days are coming when things will get better, First we must overcome the stormy weather,
and some who spoke fast and rhythmically in a kind of jailhouse rap,
I pace back and forth in a straight line, Thinking of nothing, trying to burn Time, The darkness cloaks the brightest of days, The chill in the bones is here to stay,
and many who called out to God,
Although I still sit in my cell, my new home, for hours and days upon end, I know in my heart that I’m never alone, ’cause Jesus is now my best friend.
The life of Shalimar the clown had dwindled to this, but he never ranted, nor did he sing, nor did he speak fast and rhythmically, nor did he call upon God. He took what was given to him and waited, when William T. Tillerman abandoned him and walked away he heard all around the voices of death row’s most hated inmates telling him, man, took me four years to find an attorney to get my appeal lodged, that ain’t nothin’, motherfucker, took me five and a half, there were men who had waited nine years or ten, waited for justice they said, because many of them still protested their innocence, many of them had studied up and knew the statistics, the percentage of exonerations on death row was high, far, far higher than in the rest of the prison community, so God would help, if you trusted in God he would send down his love and save you, but in the meanwhile you just had to wait, you just had to hope your number didn’t come up when some election-happy governor wanted a condemned man to fry.

On the wall of his prison cell a previous inmate had chalked a chemical equation:
2NaCn + H2SO4 = 2HCN + Na2SO4.
This, Shalimar the clown realized, was the true sentence of his death. “You don’t need to worry about no ten years, pretty boy,” one of the guards taunted him. “Brutha, in yo’ case we hear ev’thing gonna be
expedite.
”

This turned out not to be true. The months lengthened into years. Five years passed, more than five years, two thousand slow, stinking days. The fabric of the prison was crumbling and so were its inmates. A rainstorm brought down chunks of the perimeter wall, injuring guards and prisoners. The men on death row grew older, fell sick, got stabbed, got kicked to death, got shot. There were many ways to die here that were not covered by the equation on Shalimar the clown’s cell wall. After the third year he chose to come out of his cell and allow himself to be strip-searched and go outside wearing only his underwear and participate in yard and let what had to be come to pass. On the first day there were clumps of men staring at him, challenging him. He did not try to stare anybody down. He leaned against a wall and looked up at the giant green chimney stack sticking out of the gas-chamber roof. After the gas chamber was used the poison gas, the hydrogen cyanide, HCN, would be released into the atmosphere through this pipe. He turned his eyes away.

Men were playing cards at the two card tables. Other men were going one on one under a basketball hoop. He went to the chin-up bar and when he had completed one hundred chin-ups the basketball players stopped playing. When he had completed two hundred the poker school broke up. When he had completed three hundred he had everyone’s attention. He dropped to the floor and went back to lean against the wall. People noticed he wasn’t sweating. One of the most important Bloods came up to him. He was a big three-hundred-pounder and he was holding a sharpened plastic blade that had fooled the metal detector. The gang lord leaned toward Shalimar the clown and said, “No strongman stunt gonna save yo’ terroris’ ass now.” Shalimar the clown’s movements seemed unhurried but as a result of them the Blood King was in a painful armlock and Shalimar the clown had the plastic blade at his throat and before the guards could shoot he had pushed the Blood King away and tossed the blade into the yard toilet. After that he was left alone for a year. Then six men jumped him in a coordinated attack and he was badly beaten and fractured two ribs but he broke three men’s legs and blinded a fourth. The guards held their fire. Wallace, the officer who had taunted him four years earlier, told him, “Only reason we didn’t gun you down was, we waitin’ to see you choke in that ol’ gas cooker over there.”

He had found a lawyer, a man named Isidore “Zizzy” Brown who was handling the cases of several of the poorest A/C inmates, and was one of the hundreds of death-row attorneys resident in the San Quentin area. There were meetings from time to time in the visitors’ cage. At these meetings Shalimar the clown did not appear to be especially interested in the appeals process. One of the other inmates warned him during yard that his lawyer had a bad reputation. Apparently he had acquired his nickname by falling asleep several times in court. On one such occasion the judge had remarked, “The Constitution says everyone’s entitled to the attorney of their choice. The Constitution doesn’t say the lawyer has to be awake.” Shalimar shrugged. “It doesn’t really matter,” he said. Five years passed and finally Brown told him an appeal date had been set. “Let it pass,” said Shalimar the clown. “You don’t want to appeal?” the attorney asked. Shalimar the clown turned away from him. “It’s enough now,” he said. That night when he closed his eyes he realized he couldn’t see Pachigam clearly anymore, his memories of the valley of Kashmir had grown imprecise, broken beneath the weight of life in the A/C. He could no longer clearly see his family’s faces. He saw only Kashmira; all the rest was blood.

A man was executed at San Quentin that year. His name was Floyd Grammar and he was a diagnosed schizophrenic who talked to his food and believed that the beans on his plate talked back to him. He was on death row for the double murder of a business executive and his secretary in Corte Madera; after shooting them dead he had gone home and taken off all his clothes except for his socks and then stood out in the street until the police came. Nobody ever knew why he did it. He didn’t know himself. Martians might have been involved. On the night before his lethal injection he believed that he had been granted an amnesty and so refused to fill out the last-meal request form. The guards gave him cookies and sandwiches and took him away. One hour later Shalimar the clown stood naked at his cell door while the guard named Wallace searched him before letting him go out to the yard. Wallace was in a good mood, a comical mood. Interest in the execution had been high. A media center had been set up on the prison grounds and one hundred accredited persons had been given passes. “We on national TV, man,” Wallace said, holding Shalimar the clown’s testicles in his gloved hand. “But we just rehearsin’. The main attraction is when we do you. Today we just terminated some dummy. Call it a dummy run.” Something broke inside Shalimar the clown at that moment, and naked as he was with his balls in the other man’s hand he brought up his knee as fast as he could and hammered downward with both hands joined together and he pounded at Wallace for a spell until two other guards shot at him with wooden bullets and knocked him out. The guards gathered round him and kicked his unconscious body for several minutes, breaking his ribs all over again and damaging his back and injuring his groin so severely that he was unable to walk for a week and smashing his nose in two places and that was the end of his pretty-boy looks.